


if this be error

by Wildehack (tyleet)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Do Not Archive (The Magnus Archives), M/M, the inherent romanticism of vicious cycles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-12-13 21:56:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21004790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: Elias likes bad ideas.





	if this be error

**Author's Note:**

> Anon asked for Lonely Eyes + "What’s their greatest strength as a couple? Their weakness?" on tumblr. 
> 
> My thinking: it’s the same answer.

He meets Peter Lukas for the first time shortly after he becomes Elias Bouchard. Peter is young--in his late thirties, but for the very first time. He's also an unexpected wrench in Elias's plans to acquire a certain device from Mikhail Salesa, and Elias has to make a quick decision about whether to risk offending Nathaniel by putting his nephew in a coma. He alters his plans instead, and so his evening ends not with the acquisition he'd hoped for, but with Peter Lukas sitting on the desk in his office, a glass of scotch in his hand, muddy boots on Elias's chair.  
  
"That's a bit rude, Captain Lukas," Elias says mildly, and Peter grins at him.   
  
"I can be ruder, if you like," he says, and kicks the chair aside, widens his legs in a crass invitation.   
  
Elias takes it, stepping in between them and then lifting the scotch out of Peter's hands and putting it on the desk beside him.   
  
"What are we to do with you?" Elias asks him, touching a finger very lightly to Peter's chin.   
  
Peter's expression is warm with interest despite his eyes, which are wonderfully cold. "Whatever you like," Peter answers him.   
  
*

Peter’s hands are always cold to the touch. Poor circulation runs in the family. Due to all the inbreeding, one assumes. Still, there’s something pleasant about the consistency of it, how it feels the same every time. Once Elias uses it as a curative for a particularly persistent migraine, taking one rough-knuckled hand and pressing it to his own temple, sighing a little in relief.   
  
“Are you using me as a cold compress,” Peter asks him, amused.   
  
“Needs must,” Elias answers with his eyes closed, keeping Peter’s hand where he put it.   
  
The next time Elias finds himself blinking away a headache in Peter’s company, Peter strokes cold fingers against the ache without being asked.   
  
Elias will get headaches, no matter how carefully he hydrates or manages his mild caffeine addiction. They’re also genetically predetermined, and if you’re going to inhabit a body, there’s no escaping its little quirks.   
  
“Eye strain,” Peter suggests, and Elias rolls his. 

  
*  
  
The first time Elias takes Peter to bed he knows how it’s going to be. He bites his tongue bloody trying not to make a sound, and Peter laughs at him, takes it as a personal challenge. Elias groans when he comes, and Peter kisses the bright pulse of coppery hurt out of his mouth, sucking on his bitten tongue. It’s a bad idea, letting this pale, cold man between his legs, welcoming him into the heat of his own body. It hurts, and it’s going to keep hurting, no matter how disciplined Elias is.   
  
He groans again and claws his hands on Peter’s shoulders, tries to yank him even closer.   
  
*  
  
His Archivist is hard at work disrupting a ritual, neatly snipping through the work of centuries.   
  
This isn’t quite what Elias pays her for, but he has no possible reason to object.   
  
“Really, Gertrude?” he asks her, irritated to be forced to come down to the Archives instead of trusting that she’d actually answer his summons. “Your plan is to stop The Empty World with the power of _love_?”   
  
“I had thought of Captain Lukas,” Gertrude answers him calmly, putting her pen down on the desk, “But I thought ultimately the Herne girl would be easier.” She smiles, tight and satisfied. “Less risk of cross-contamination.”   
  
“I thought we were past personal remarks,” he replies, carefully burying his reaction to that little remark. “Particularly with the fate of the world at stake.”   
  
“Report me to Jeannie, if you like,” Gertrude says, her smile turning condescending. “Now, may I continue? The fate of the world is at stake, after all.”   
  
“It’s a significant gamble,” Elias says, because this is what he’d come down here to say. “Just because it worked on Agnes doesn’t mean it’ll work again.”   
  
Gertrude shrugs. “They share the same interests. She’s pretty. She looks enough like a tasty meal to tempt him. I’m willing to take the risk. Unless you’d _like_ to volunteer.” She’s grown insolent in her old age.   
  
"And you've grown careless in your youth," Gertrude notes, as though she _wouldn't_ choose to remain forty-six if their patron would grant her the option. It also irks him to see her so easily skimming the surface of his thoughts when the last time she took a direct statement was six months ago. "Don't avoid the subject," she says.   
  
Elias is not in love with Peter Lukas.   
  
He is very careful about this particular fact.   
  
“He isn’t as careful,” Gertrude says pityingly.   
  
“_Nor are you_,” Elias bites out, and leaves the office before he does something he regrets.   
  
If Elias were in love with Peter Lukas, he might extend him the courtesy of a warning. The Empty World will not succeed. Gertrude Robinson is coming for it.   
  
He does not.  
  
For one thing, he needs Gertrude.   
  
For another, the Empty World will not serve the Eye.   
  
And for a third, the truth: he is curious to see what will happen.   
  
*  
  
Peter doesn't visit him in prison.   
  
"Alfred Douglas didn't visit Oscar Wilde in prison," he informs Elias over the phone instead, in an amused crackle of static, and Elias rubs his temple. Jon hasn't been eating, and it's beginning to wear at him. He suppresses the desire to rest his head in Peter's cool hands, irritated with himself.   
  
"I hope you aren't expecting me to write you an angry love letter in the form of an essay," he says, and Peter sighs.   
  
"You could if you _wanted_," Peter replies, and Elias rolls his eyes.   
  
*  
  
By the time Elias gets there, Jon has already ripped a statement and most of Peter’s life story out of Peter’s throat, a tape recorder still whirring in his hand. Peter is collapsed on the floor, thin trickles of blood running down from his nose and ears. He sees Elias and smiles, broad and sincere, although his eyes don’t match. They never do.   
  
“Darling,” Peter says hoarsely. “Just in time to join the fun.”   
  
“We’re too late,” Jon says, turning to Elias in one jerking movement, so worked up with rage and worry and finally-sated hunger that he doesn’t even realize he’s used the word _we_. “He’s already stopped it.”   
  
Elias knows. He knew when it happened. Peter took his little acolyte and made him attempt the Watcher’s Crown early, and obviously Martin failed, as Peter intended him to.   
  
Elias stoops down to Peter’s level, brushes his fingertips against Peter’s jaw. “You’ve ruined a hundred years of work,” he says lightly. “And you’ve killed the man my Archivist loves.”   
  
Jon makes a choked sound behind him. Perhaps he hadn’t realized Martin was dead, or as good as. Surely Peter would have told him that Martin couldn’t be retrieved, at the very least.   
  
Peter smiles thinly at him. “Unavoidable,” he says. “Considering.” 

Elias has a headache. He is fairly certain that if he were to play back the tape in Jon’s hands, he would get something that resembled a confession of love.  
  
Love isn’t an automatic victory against the Lonely, unfortunately. The wrong kind of love feeds on itself, ever-hungry, ever-devouring, a miserable ouroboros.   
  
“What are we to do with you?” he asks, dropping his hand, and his Archivist makes another involuntary sound.   
  
*  
  
The Lukases age slowly, an inevitable side-effect of their constant offerings, but they still tend to die somewhere between eighty to a hundred years after being born. Elias assumes this plays into their obsession with reproduction. Elias’s solution is much more effective for the long term, not that he would offer to share it if he could.   
  
“Will anything change for you, after I die?” Peter asks him once, lying in bed with one cold hand idly stroking over Elias’s stomach. “Of peaceful old age, naturally.”   
  
Elias pauses to consider. “Eventually I’ll need a new body,” he says. “That usually changes things somewhat.”   
  
Peter smiles at him, and as usual, it doesn't reach his eyes. “You won’t miss me?”   
  
“Should I?” Elias asks, and Peter shivers.   
  
“You are an ever-fixéd mark,” Peter says fondly if inanely, and kisses him.   
  
*  
  
"What are we to do with you?" Elias asks, dropping his hand.   
  
“Whatever you like,” Peter says to him, reaching up to scrub the blood away from his mouth. He closes his eyes, which has the effect of making him seem twice as sincere as usual.  
  
Elias sighs.   
  
Every time.   
  
*   
  
“This is a bad idea,” Jon insists, watching Peter limp away into the dark of the tunnels.   
  
“I know,” Elias says, and claps a hand on Jon’s shoulder, pretends not to notice the flinch. “Come on. We’ve got work to do. Or don’t you want to bring our Mr. Blackwood back to us?”   
  
That’s another bad idea, honestly, but it gets Jon to follow him back to the institute.   
  
*  
  
Elias likes bad ideas.   
  
*  
  
"Do you know what the definition of madness is?" Peter asks him thoughtfully, and Elias makes a face, pausing in his careful catalogue of the places on Peter's throat that will make him shudder if bitten.   
  
"A hackneyed cliché," Elias says, and bites down.   
  
Peter shudders. "Mm, yes, but surely clichés are--cliché for a reason?"   
  
Elias isn't doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.   
  
"Stop talking," Elias tells Peter instead, and presses two fingers to Peter's lips, expecting the little rush that goes right to his gut when Peter sucks them into his mouth, stroking the pads of Elias's fingers with his tongue. Elias's eyes slip closed.   
  
This is exactly the result Elias expects.   
  
*   
  
"Again?" Peter asks, hoarse and thrilled, like it's not going to kill them both eventually.   
  
"Again," Elias agrees.  
  
His heart beats and beats in his chest, dumb animal body saying yes, yes, every time yes. Some day soon he'll leave the body behind, and then perhaps the answer will change.   
  
Peter rests a big cold hand over Elias's thundering heart, and Elias releases an unsteady breath and kisses him.   
  
They do it again. 

**Author's Note:**

> "It's going to be the same every time. :)" -Janet, The Good Place
> 
> "Let me not to the marriage of true minds  
Admit impediments. Love is not love  
Which alters when it alteration finds,  
Or bends with the remover to remove.  
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark  
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;  
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,  
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.  
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks  
Within his bending sickle's compass come;  
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,  
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.  
If this be error and upon me prov'd,  
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd." 
> 
> -Billy Shakes, Sonnet 116


End file.
